RISULTATI RICERCA

In 1994 Silvio Berlusconi was able to enter the field thanks to his ability to exploit traditional elements typical of the Italian political system (such as anti-politics and the critique of parties and State). Then he magnified a phenomenon that had always existed, albeit in different forms: the personalisation of politics. Despite the fact that Berlusconi possesses a high level of charisma, which, in a weberian way, he could have exploited, thanks to the situation of collective anxiety of that time, nevertheless, neither was he able to make the most of it in the appropriated manner in order to transform the political system, nor to institutionalise it, not even in the context of his own political party, Forza Italia. After ten years, long-standing problems are yet to be solved, perhaps they have even worsened and the Centre-Left has not been able to sufficiently and appropriately learn from it in order to improve politics and institutions.

Evoluzione del servizio pubblico televisivo, modalità di finanziamento e implicazioni per i consumatori (di Marco Gambaro) - ABSTRAC: In the last ten years the growth of the television markets and the increase of the supply have reduced the role of the public broadcasters and sometimes contributed to the crises of the old monopolists. The development of the market has put in the limelight the licence fee, which, in most countries, is paid as a tax on the TV set, and which is used to finance public broadcaster. In a more open market where competition is great and companies operate both in regulated and competitive markets at the sometime, there is the traditional problem of a possible utilization of this income (amount) by the public broadcasters as a kind of cross subsidisation to finance their entry and to maintain a competitive position in competitive markets. In a developed market the problem arises of defining a new role for the public broadcaster (for the public service). That is to say what kind of programmes, what services, what types of programme selection we want to offer people, over and above, what the market itself offers. Moreover it is necessary to ask ourselves which is the best institutional and industrial structure to provide this public service. In fact several solutions are possible, from a single television company to specific obligations for all market participants.

The necessity of considering, within incentive (price cap) regulation mechanism, the profitability of regulated firms narrows the distance between incentive regulation and cost reimbursement (rate-of-return) regulation. It gives rise also to issues of circularity between allowed prices and value of the firm and to possible distortions in the investment decisions of the regulated firms. With price cap regulation, in fact, the definition of an allowed (regulatory) asset base is functional to determining the «appropriate » rate of return on capital and, thus, the allowed level of profitability of the regulated utility: at the beginning of each regulatory lag, the initial price and X value must be determined in order to ensure the remuneration of all factors of production, included the capital invested. However, the exact definition and measurement criteria of the regulatory asset base is, perhaps, the aspect of the regulatory system which has raised the most debate among regulators, utilities and academics, both in European and non-European countries. The regulatory accounting systems adopted in order to determine the value of the capital invested in regulated utilities are based on different approaches and the solutions vary widely not only among different countries, but also, within the same country, between regulatory authorities. The aim of the paper is to review ongoing experiences with regard to use and calculation of the regulatory asset base within incentive regulation. The work will focus on the main characteristics of the regulatory accounting systems relating to asset evaluation adopted in different countries: it will consider available alternatives, emerging trends (if any) and, through a benchmark analysis, comparative performances.

The international gas and electricity markets could be described as bilateral oligopolies. Both sides of the market are formed by a limited number of firms; the few exporters on the supply side and the few importers on the demand side are unlikely to be price-takers. The paper aims at describing what the state-of-art in the economics research suggests about the determination of prices in such markets and about the role of the relative concentration of the two sides of the market. In particular, the paper focuses on the findings of three main strands of literature. First, it describes the results of bargaining theory when the agents negotiating over the price of an indivisible good are more than two. Even for the case of one seller and two different buyers, the price emerging from the negotiation while it is clearly different from the bilateral monopoly case it could also diverge from the competitive outcome, as well as from the prediction of the auction theory. For the case of bargaining between two sellers and two different buyers, some seminal models have recently been studied, confirming how sensibly the price is affected by the structure of a «thin» market. Secondly, the paper presents some considerations about the role of relative concentration of the two sides of the market. The hypothesis of existence of some degree of «countervailing power» is discussed. Finally, the focus on the infra-structural networks typically observed in the electricity and gas markets, leads to consider the findings of the recent literature on two-sided network markets.

The aim of the present study is to analyse possible ways to manage the use of the available water resources by a specific tariff system regulation, according with the Italian context and low system, as defined by «Galli Act», to control and to reduce pollution and environmental effects linked with the various possible water uses in the agricultural, household and industrial sectors. The national water industry sector, under the push of the above said normative reform, is knowing a deep, even if not very quick, changing process, that should lead it toward a more rational, efficient and economic productive order. At the moment the reform seems to be at the beginning, so that dose not appear very easy to forecast how this process will change the behaviours of the main actors of the system, and which effects, in a long term view, these could produce. In this context we do not feel correct to reduce the analysis in a simple comparative evaluation of different tariff system solutions in a static approach, but appear necessary to develop this matter taking into the right consideration many other aspects of the context, such as, in a particular way, the targets of the subjects that should produce and offer water services, the rules to select them (that dose not seem to lead to save water resources) and the normative planning instruments adoptable to establish the limit of environmental uses, and to plain a supportable use of natural resources.

The regulation of natural monopolies has been widely investigated in economic literature. Particular emphasis has been placed on the relationship between the regulated firm and the regulator. The present work tries to deal with problems that may arise when there is more than one regulator. In this case, if regulators have different objective functions, inefficiency is likely to arise. The water industry seems to suffer from these kind of problems, indeed, given the local dimension of the industry, there are different levels of regulation with possible divergent interests. The analysis is mainly based on the work of David Baron (1985), who investigated the case of a polluting firm in the electricity industry, regulated by two authorities. In my work, I use a similar model to show how non cooperation amongst agencies regulating a firm in the water industry can lead to inefficient equilibria.

It is well known that the water cycle is going to assume a central role in the economic system because of its increasing relative shortage. This means that even though the water available to planet Earth is the same water that has always been available and the only water that ever will be available, in reality however, we have a limited amount of usable drinking water. Since the drinking water conservation and its production depends on the economic activity, in this paper we analyse the link between water cycle and the economic system constructing a new type or framework that combines standard material of account (MFA) techniques with make and use (M&U) accounting matrices in order to coordinate the physical issues of accounting to the value issues. The impact of economic policies on the water cycles as well as consistency of policies with sustainability is then evaluated showing the importance of the natural resourceseconomic system feedback in this kind of analysis. In other terms, this new framework allows the analyst to consider both the effect of given policies on the water cycle and the constraint produced by the sustainability problem on the economic system. Finally, we studied the dynamical system resulting from the MFA and M&U integration and show how to investigate the estimation problem of the framework extrapolating the use by use matrices from the system.

The paper investigates the allocation of public consumption expenditures in the UK. After reviewing the empirical literature on the demand for public services, which is based on applied consumer analysis, it introduces a general political economy framework to analyse the collective choice process within which public expenditures are determined. Following this the paper discusses the budgetary making process in the UK. It proceeds by estimating a system of demand equations for general government consumption expenditures in the UK during the period 1963-1996. In addition to estimating the effects of relative prices, total expenditure and demographic variables, it finds that the constraints of homogeneity and symmetry cannot be rejected.

The liberalization of public service’s market in Europe in now widely diffused. During the last years, the European Commission has adopted several directives aimed to liberalize (and in some case privatize) different sectors such as electricity and gas. State members have implemented those directives at national level in different ways related to different specificities (economics, socials, cultural) of each sector. In this perspective, local public firms have defined their own reorganization’s strategies of the supply side management to maximize the efficiency and minimize costs in order to compete with private firms, nationals and strangers. The mix of all those factors determines that actually, for local public services, we don’t have national supply models but service’s (gas, electricity, water, etc.) supply models.

The paper begins by outlining some of the issues connected with the «Private Finance Initiative» (PFI) in the UK. It considers the current scale of PFI expenditure in terms of its impact on investment, the implications for the future course of public expenditure and the extent to which PFI expenditure has reduced the measured size of the public debt. The relative cost of finance of PFI as compared with the alternative of direct government borrowing to finance investment is discussed. The way in which the choice of a Public sector comparator (PSC) is decisions on PFI project proposal is assessed with particular reference to the impact of the choice of the discount rate. The claim that the PFI provides additional investment for the public sector is critically examined and largely rejected. The argument that the costs of construction and of operation are lower under PFI than under conventional schemes is also critically examined. It is argued here that the claim that the use of PFI is a way of transferring risk from the public sector to the private sector cannot be sustained.

The economic organisation of the infrastructure industries at the beginning of the 20th century is analysed and government policies evaluated. The focus is railways, telecommunications, energy, water and sanitation. The paper will outline and attempt to explain the differences in government involvement across, mainly Western, European countries (France, Germany, Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Italy and Spain). Regulation via the concession system, municipal ownership, state guarantees of bond interest, profit sharing and nationalisation can all be found in parts of these countries and reflect government attitudes over the 1840-1914 period. My aim is to ascertain how far these differences can be explained in terms of economic factors like natural monopoly, transaction costs, capital shortages and government initiatives for industrialisation as opposed to considerations of national defence or unification of regions or ideologies. There may be some lessons here for the transition debate.

The new theories of regulation show how to achieve the best possible results if the regulatorlacks information. This paper has first presented various simple regulatory mechanisms, in particular the Vogelsang-Finsinger iterative mechanism and Shleifer’s yardstick regulation. Unfortunately, in practical applications of these simple mechanisms the regulated utility will be able to dodge the regulator’s intentions by strategic behavior. This has lead us to a treatment of informationally-demanding regulatory mechanisms which are incentive-compatible and, therefore, strategy-proof. Unfortunately, however, the regulator must be extremely well-informed if he wants to apply this sort of regulation: except for the actual realizations of a cost or demand characteristic and the effort of the manager, he must be perfectly informed about the situation of the regulated public utility. This must be the main reason why in practice the simple price-cap regulation prevails, in particular, the RPI-X type of price regulation. Obviously, it represents an acceptable compromise between not too high information problems and not too high incentives for managerial strategic behavior.